This Bud's for You!

It happened. We legalized it! Pot is going to be the next great consumer product. Or so we all sort of believe. To commemorate, GQ's critical shopper (marijuana division) travels to the most weed-friendly states in the union and offers GQ readers the first-ever authoritative guide to the lingo, the rules, the shops, and of course the many, many methods (lollipops! honey! wax! magical microwave popcorn! something called "dabs"?!) of getting high-legally! kind of!—in these United States

In November, they basically legalized marijuana. Even if you don’t pay attention to ballot initiatives or the like, you probably still possessed a fuzzy picture of where things stood. As of the past election cycle, marijuana is now _totally street legal _in Colorado and Washington. And possibly Oregon? And you’d been hearing for years about all those other places—there was a new state all the time—where you could buy it for medical purposes. Like California and Washington, D.C., and Connecticut and Rhode Island and, like, maybe New Mexico? Meanwhile, even in states where there is not yet a stipulation for those undergoing chemo to be able to blaze out, isn’t it functionally decriminalized? Isn’t it more or less okay to smoke weed right in front of a cop in New York City as long as you’re not killing someone with a tire iron while simultaneously being young and nonwhite? And conventional wisdom, at least from certain purviews, holds that the social taboo surrounding marijuana is now close to zero, whether you’re into older white women in Eileen fisher comfies (see: Steve Martin in It’s Complicated) or rap music (see: rap music).

More Weed:

We’ve supposedly been on the cusp of this new world for a long time. And if we haven’t arrived at it yet, we are now on the cusp of the cusp of the cusp of the future that stoners, libertarians, and other people you’ve gotten stuck talking to in bathroom lines at parties have predicted for decades: a time when marijuana becomes a normal commercial commodity. Grown safely by nice people, tad and regulated. But also packaged and branded! The moment when weed at long last fulfills its vast potential to be one of the great—maybe even the greatest, now that tobacco is passé—American consumer products. Something, like yoga or frozen yogurt, around which distinct lifestyles can be built. Something that, like Rag & Bone blazers and the cheeses of France, can by dint of acquisitional obsession make you forget about everything bad. We may finally be nearing the moment when whether you smoke weed no longer defines you, but maybe _where you shop _for weedwill. The only question is: What kind of shopping bliss awaits us?

It would seem that certain precincts already know the answer to that question. In cities like Los Angeles and Seattle and Denver, where it’s been gray-area legal for years, they’ve already built the foundations of the commercial-weed ecosystem. To know what the future holds, wouldn’t one merely consult an expert in these places?

Step 1

DETERMINE WHAT KIND OF WEED SHOPPER YOU ARE

In the quest to review and systematize the nascent marijuana-shopping experience, the first place _GQ’_s Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, visited was a medical-marijuana dispensary called Denver Relief, which provides relief for people in Denver by way of getting blazed. (_GQ’_s Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, heard many phrases for being high while reviewing dispensaries—faded, zooted, blasted, smoked yourself cheese-dicked—but objectively the most awesome is blazed, so you should probably get used to reading it.)

Like a lot of dispensaries, Denver Relief is located somewhere most accurately described as nondescript. Critical Shopper literally does not remember where it is, except that you can see a parking lot out the window. The waiting room is the kind of place where it feels like a hot-stone massage might break out at any moment: leather sofas, oriental rugs, piped-in synthesizer music. Shopper flipped through a back issue of National Geographic and The Cannabible while he waited for the receptionist, in a cozy sweater behind a spotless Plexiglas window, to buzz him into the "bud room" when it was his turn.

Would you like to have weed sold to you the way someone might sell you a 2007 Acura with lo miles totally mint? Well, at this little dispensary, located inconspicuously on the fifth floor of a downtown office building, you can! Just listen to Garrett, the salesman, shill the daily special: "Bro, check out my strains of the day, my White Dawg and my Kuchi, $200 an ounce. Smell this; it smells like candy. I’m kicking myself for selling it so cheap, but I have new stuff coming in!"

In the intervening moments of waiting, a chubby shape appeared bushwhacking through the neighborhood outside, all trussed up in technical winter gear and a backpack. Across the four-lane washed in desiccated road salt he hiked, and right up to the front door, where he cupped his hands against the sun’s cold glare and peered into the waiting room, his hood cinched up like a nylon butthole. When his eyes adjusted and he could see Shopper, he grinned. He grinned and he waved: Hello! Shopper waved back.

Once inside and un-buttholed, the bushwhacker began to pose some important questions to the waiting room. "I’d heard this is one of the greatest places in Colorado as far as quality product goes," he said. "Is it true?" His cheeks were flush and his hair matted. He couldn’t stop smiling. He said he’d come in from the other side of the state, and Shopper thought it possible that he’d hiked.

Shopper had on this day brought with him another Critical Marijuana Shopper: the weed reviewer for Westword, the Denver alt-weekly, a man who writes under the name William Breathes. Shopper will not physically describe William Breathes, because his important work is possible only as long as he’s anonymous. Breathes confirmed Bushwhacker’s information. "As far as flower goes?" Breathes said. "The best in Denver are Denver Relief, the Pink House, and the Clinic. The quality is phenomenal."

The bushwhacker got beamier and clapped his hands once as if to say: After all this time and all my travels, I have found the Lost City! He sat back and crossed his arms. He would be satisfied to wait until his turn in the bud room came up, no matter how long it should take.

So that’s the first question you need to ask yourself when you start shopping for weed: How serious am I about marijuana? How erudite do I want to get on it? If this answer is "pretty freaking erudite," you should consider a place like those listed above by Breathes in Denver, or Greenworks or Dockside Co-op in Seattle, or Buds & Roses in Los Angeles. What Shopper calls the Connoisseur Class. Or Straight Nerd Spots. They offer their own brand of experience. To wit:

Once in the bud room, Ean Seeb, one of the proprietors, brought out some of his favorite strains to show Shopper. "This is our LA OG," he said, opening a glass canister filled with sculpted buds, all purplish and gnarled. Ean doesn’t look like the guy who would sell you a dime bag out of the back of a Saturn Vue. He was that day fully _GQ’_ed out in a black cowl-neck sweater. His gray wingtips had neon pink laces. "Give it a smell," he said.

Breathes took the canister and inhaled: "That has a really nice baby powder and kind of...mint! Just a wonderful baby-powder nose on it."

"We say it’s earthy with a hint of dryer sheets," Ean says.

Normally, Shopper would not be allowed in the bud room without a state-issued red card. But Ean made an exception for journalistic purposes. What was it like? A rectangle not bigger than twenty feet across, with faux-exposed-brick walls. Stretching across one side of the room was a long granite countertop with wooden partitions so no one need eyeball your merch. It called to mind the showroom of a rare-coin dealer. Only, behind the counter, lit lovingly, were thirty-two glass jars on shelves. And in each of these jars were dozens and dozens of grotesquely large, obsessively manicured marijuana blossoms. They had names like Bio-Jesus, Gumbo, Tahoe OG, Bio-Diesel, Dopium, Ghost Train Haze, Hashberry, Headband, Q3. All grown by Denver Relief itself, in its enormous grow house. (In Colorado, dispensaries must grow at least 70 percent of their product.) Having come from one of the states where places like this don’t exist, Shopper realized that a pervasive sense of scarcity had always surrounded weed in most parts of society. It’s something people kept in old cigar bos in the backs of underpants drawers, something there was never that much of, and when it ran out, who knew exactly when you could get more? Even without being a particularly avid user, being in one of these rooms for the first time can trigger the same hoarding impulse a Sudanese refugee might feel in a Walmart.

"Oh, wait. Oh, wait," Ean said. "We have some Reserva Privada. That’s what won us first prize for indica in the state of Colorado."

He retrieved a jar. Breathes breathed. "Mmmmm," he said. "Uh-huh, uh-huh. It’s got the sweet earthiness that all the Kushes do. But it’s rubbery. Almost a new-Nike smell. Smell that, [Shopper]."

Shopper, himself, could not smell the new-Nike smell. Shopper could never even tell the difference between the two distinct families of marijuana, sativa and indica, the lemon and lime of the weed world. Every strain Shopper sniffed while critical shopping smelled powerful and more refined than Shopper remembers of even the most high-end product he’s encountered on the black market—as if the component parts of the aroma had been isolated and then remid and amplified. But anytime he said he smelled the tar or the floor-cleaner aroma, he was lying. Because, be aware: If you’re going to spend time in a Connoisseur Class establishment, you’re going to have to say you smell the floor cleaner in the Lemon Haze, or you’re going to bum someone out. The shopping experience at this type of dispensary can be a protracted, and often pleasing, form of blazationforeplay. But it can also mean a decent amount of bullshitting. It was not unusual for Shopper to be offered a dish of coffee beans to cleanse his nose-palate between sniffing strains. Shopper thought it worthwhile to search out places appropriate for those who aren’t as erudite as all that.

Over the course of a month visiting three cities in three states—Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle—Shopper sampled a great deal of the branding and marketing ingenuity of the legal-marijuana industry. Though maybe ingenuity isn’t the right word. It was like witnessing the collective unconscious of the American Stoner—for so long relegated to the margins and the basement rec rooms of this great country—finally unleashed upon the retail spaces of America. And the marketing schemes that have emerged are maybe not the most mainstream. Are you a stoner comic-book nerd? At the APC dispensary in Toluca Lake, California, they attract clientele with a large hand-painted Star Wars mural and strains with names like OG1 Kenobi and Yoda’s Brain. Grateful Dead blazer? You might want to check out Grateful Meds in Nederland, Colorado, and Terrapin Care Station in Boulder. Still other dispensaries evoke surfer weed-dom (like the Lucky LadyZ dispensary on Alki Beach in Seattle) or hip-hop-celebrity weed-dom (like the Perennial Holistic Wellness Center in L.A., which features a giant photograph of Rihanna—coincidentally a GQ cover).

Attention, people who’ve always wanted to hang out in a hash den! This little gem is housed in the basement of a small office building where you’d expect to find an orthodontist. But no retainers here! Instead, gilt stools, velvet upholstery, and low ceilings mark this dispensary. One of the owners explained that, yes, it was meant to evoke "a hash-den vibe." Be sure to pick up a T-shirt or bandanna bearing a Pink House motto: "Down to blaze!"

But what surprised Shopper wasn’t the variety and novelty of the dispensaries. It was how, across three states, they were mostly all the same. All located in places you’d expect to find either a tax preparer or a defunct porn store. Did they have exactly the same names? It sure seemed like it. The Little Green Pharmacy, Green Cure, Mile High Green Cross, the Green Door, Green House. And inside, high-end or low-end, they hewed to the same blueprint. The waiting room. The Plexiglas portal. The portraits of Bob Marley. The giant supercrisp-picture flat-screen TV tuned either to ESPN or to one of the channels that do crime re-creations. The bud room with one case of pipes and bongs, a cooler for drinks, a display of edibles and "concentrates," and, dominating the room, the flower bar, which usually featured canisters of buds arranged in rows from top (highest end) to bottom (best value), with your bud tenders standing nearby, manning the tweezers. Who were usually women and usually attractive. That’s not an accident.

"We prefer female bud tenders," one of the employees at GroundSwell, in Denver, tells Shopper. "Females just sell a lot more weed. Guys like to buy their weed from females. And girls like to buy their weed from females." But really, the shopping is done mostly by men. Shopper went to thirty-odd dispensaries across three cities, and Shopper saw maybe three female patients the whole time.

Still, after a lot of shopping, a nagging question refused to go away: Where was the Barneys of dispensaries? Where was the Fred Segal? Where was the place worthy of a write-up in the most fashionable men’s magazine in the world!? Well, the truth is that there’s no Fred Segal yet. That’s kind of what happens when businesses can’t get loans from banks. (Would you loan millions of dollars to a business that explicitly violated a federal law?) But what is there, then? There are glimmers of luxury-lifestyle hope. There is the Farmacy in Venice Beach, California—maybe the most visionary marijuana retail experience available in America today.

The Farmacy is not tucked into an office park with a view of a parking lot. It’s not located behind a collision-repair shop in the Valley. There is no waiting room. It’s a store. Located on a street. With actual glass windows you can see through both ways. And not just located on the street, but on Abbot Kinney, a stretch of retail nirvana that GQ last year named the coolest shopping street in America. A street where you can buy a $16 vegan young-coconut smoothie, a $140 surf-nostalgia sweatshirt at Aviator Nation, and, yes, a $700 ounce of organically grown Dutch Treat from the Farmacy. On the day Shopper perused, the door was wide open and a breeze was coming in off the Pacific. There was a framed portrait of Bob Marley, but that’s not the ethos. The ethos is: This should feel like a place where you can buy a $95 cotton yoga tank. Wood counters, pretty clientele, young bright-eyed shopkeepers. (They don’t call them "bud tenders" at the Farmacy; that’s too down-market, too stoner-y.) Shopper would like to remind all shoppers, though, that while anyone is welcome to come in and thumb through the library of alternative-medicine books or buy a Farmacy T-shirt, you can’t actually buy weed here unless you happen to be a resident of the state of California and are in possession of a marijuana "recommendation" from your doctor. The Farmacy is strict about its rules. Though not all places in California are.

Step 3

GET YOURSELF A LICENSE TO SHOP*

Not far from the Farmacy is the Venice Beach boardwalk: the sketchiest place in the union to get a "recommendation"—California’s term for a weed prescription. Because California can’t get its regulatory shit together, dispensaries in the state are basically self-regulating, and so is the system for clearing people to be able to buy it medically. And because there are strata of the weed industry that aren’t super -profesh or motivated when it comes to self-regulation, California turns out to be the perfect (read: only) place for people like Shopper to get their weed-buying license.

The first step is picking the disreputable place where you’re going to do it. All along the boardwalk, barkers in bright green doctor’s scrubs are stationed in front of storefronts, yelling, "Get legal today!" They are not doctors! This you will not be confused by, unless you are used to your doctor being a 20-year-old who wears ripped-up Vans and grabs his junk occasionally. Shopper passed by the first storefront that advertised a $50 weed license. Seemed like a rookie move, going to the first place you see. Farther down the boardwalk, though, he saw another barker, a Mr. Luke VIP, who told Shopper he’d get him legal for forty bucks. And so it was that Shopper found himself doing patient intake in a tiny storefront on the boardwalk.

"Yeah, so what’s your address?" the intake professional said, a handsome young surfer type with impressive amounts of strawberry blond hair.

Located at the edge of Seattle’s up-and-coming Arbor Heights neighborhood, this outpost offers a new concept: The entire marijuana-dispensing part of the dispensary is behind a giant Plexiglas wall. Patients enter a stylish but bare room and conduct their business with someone in a weed-filled plastic room. Some say they like it because it seems like an actual pharmacy. For Shopper, it brought to mind one of the ghetto-ass liquor stores he used to frequent as a teenager, what with having to engage the person selling the controlled substance through a Plexiglas drawer. Except, since an ounce of Purple Arrow is $280, this is a ghetto-ass liquor store for yuppies.

Shopper told him. Then Mr. Intake kind of froze. He had sunglasses on, so it was impossible to tell if he’d fallen asleep or what. When he came back to himself, he got this terrified look on his face like: _Who beamed me onto Venice Beach into this human body! I thought I was fornicating with the Duchess of York! _Later, Shopper would hear someone ask Mr. Intake whether that was Hennessy or codeine cough syrup he’d put in his Coke—that kind of explained it.

Intake over, Shopper was told to wait on one of the folding chairs next to a 50-year-old man in a Seminoles hat. Pretty soon, someone would come down and take them over to another place on the boardwalk, where they’d see a doctor. And then to another storefront where they’d get the "recommendation" itself.

Seminoles Hat and Shopper discussed the strangeness of this process. "You ever seen The Wire?" Seminoles Hat asked Shopper. He had. "It’s like when D’Angelo Barksdale is selling you crack—one guy meets you, one guy takes the money, one guy gives you the stuff." Seminoles Hat and Shopper both felt a little scuzzy just then. Maybe it was the boardwalk: Outside, a psychotic in a filthy kilt flew by, his skateboard pulled by a malnourished pit bull. A girl in a hipsta please shirt stopped to watch two tanned homeless teenage drug addicts have a fight.

The second location, where the actual doctor was, turned out to be the $50 place Shopper had passed originally. When Shopper’s name was called, he went into a small room where a medical examination would take place. Though it wasn’t yet 2 p.m., the establishment next door was playing Rick Ross’s "B.M.F." like it was pissed at someone. In this room, barely big enough for his desk, sat a tiny man in a doctor’s coat. Shopper estimates his age at 85. If Shopper were told he was closer to 100 he would be impressed he was so spry, but he wouldn’t be shocked. He wore two sweaters over a yellow T-shirt and a set of hearing aids. To his left was a half-sucked Tootsie Pop on a sticky note. To his right was the peel of a tangerine. Just as the exam started, someone turned up the Rick Ross next door. The doctor’s milky blue eyes lit up: Isn’t this absurd? And it was. Perhaps you’ve seen Being John Malkovich—there was something seventh-and-a-half-floor about this office.

Who knows how he ended up doing this, but this man was an actual medical doctor. Deaf, probably, but a doctor. He took blood pressure and everything. Asked a lot of questions. He seemed especially interested in whether Shopper had any pain in his calves.

"No constriction at all?" he asked after Shopper initially said no.

None.

"What about AIDS. You got any AIDS?"

Not even a little AIDS.

"How do your calves feel—any pain?"

Shopper told the doctor, who was funny for a possible centenarian, that his qualifying condition was sciatica. It was noted on his paperwork.

Here it becomes incumbent upon Shopper to warn all shoppers that it doesn’t cost forty bucks to get legal. It ends up costing at least $110. But like, it’s not legal for people who don’t live in California to get legal, and you know it, so you just deal. By the end, when the lady (Iranian? Uzbek?) who’s yelling at her mom on the phone finally gives you your paperwork, you’re just happy they actually give you something for the money. And seventy minutes after showing up on the boardwalk, Shopper was at a local dispensary that had been recommended by Luke VIP as being "friendly." A huge fellow with neck ink, a sideways baseball hat, and the face of a man who probably used to get punched for a living asked Shopper for his recommendation (here it is!) and his California ID (oh, I just moved here). No worries, the man said. He pointed to some steps: "That way, bro! Take that stairway to heaven!"

Step 4

ENJOY THE MANY WONDROUS THINGS YOU CAN BUY WITH YOUR NEW WEED RECOMMENDATION

Once having ascended that stairway to heaven, Shopper bought a nice light sativa and a homemade medicated Rice Krispies treat. Shoppers, take note: In the new world of marijuana products, you do not have to smoke your medicine. You can eat it in more ways than you thought possible. Once in the rental car, Shopper unwrapped his Rice Krispies treat. This is the future, right? THC presented as an odorless, tasteless chemical that can be slipped into other products. Not so. Open up a THC Rice Krispies treat and it smells like a marijuana swamp burped in your face.

Be careful. "Dosing," as they call it, is totally up to you. Which is weird. It’d be like if you walked into a drugstore and said, "I have strep throat; I need some penicillin." And they just gave you a bottle. "So like how much should I take?" "Whatever, try it out, see what works for you!"

This wasn’t Shopper’s first rodeo. (His first rodeo involved some THC lemonade in Las Vegas and three very nice hours—though it felt like ten minutes/17,000 eternities—lying in the shallows of the wave pool at the Mandalay Bay resort, contemplating the sun’s benevolent radiation and the buoyancy of silicone.) Two small bites seemed safe. But not twenty minutes later, Shopper had pulled onto the shoulder on the 405, thinking: _Why is the GPS lady talking to me in that tone? "_In 500 feet take a right and then another right..."What does that even mean? Wow, traffic is moving so fast. There’s no way to get a car back into that traffic flow. I’ll just wait it out until morning.

So no, it’s not like the old hash brownie that takes two hours to work. But brownie lovers can rest assured that brownies are still on offer. In fact, you can buy your own THC brownie (and blondie) mix so you can blaze out your mind with fresh-from-the-oven baked goods whenever you get the notion. And did you know that they make Ganje Roast Wake-n-Bake Medicated Coffee and Snow Puffs medicated microwave popcorn and Grammy’s chicken dumpling soup and hot-buttered-(medicated)-rum mix? And how yummy do Sweet Grass’s pumpkin pies look at dispensaries all across the great city of Denver? (_So _yummy.) There are snickerdoodles, scratch-baked M&M cookies, THC suckers, baklava, Rainbow Kaos Krunch bars, sodas of all kinds. There’s Canna Bull, for the Red Bull enthusiast who wants to ratchet up the energy of the night while also ratcheting it down. And feel free to enjoy D’z Nutz (dark chocolate that comes in the shape of peanuts). Seattle’s Best Cannabis ice cream brought to mind a more general worry of overmedicating: Don’t edibles introduce a dangerous M. C. Escher staircase/feedback loop of cause and effect, wherein you eat the ice cream or the cookies and then you get high, which makes you eat more cookies/ice cream, which gets you higher, ad infinitum, until you are in your car on the side of the 405 for so long you have to start peeing in water bottles?

But fear not, dieters: Eating medicine doesn’t just have to be incredibly caloric. It can be healthy! At River Rock, in Denver, they’ve been doing these smoothies made with fruit juices, hemp protein, açaí, and the juice from leaves of the Sour Tsunami plant. There is some tasty Ganja Goop—a delicious blend of organic cashews, cacao nibs, and weed-infused tropical oils—for sale throughout Seattle. And if you have food allergies and are weight-conscious and love dietary supplements, why not, as Ean from Denver Relief says, "Check out these gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free organic vegan Zoom Balls with blue-green algae and B vitamins"?

Edibles. That was the trend a few years ago. Now, as you can see, the marketplace has been flooded. But what’s trendy now, Shopper can report, is "concentrates." What used to be called hash but has now been improved upon and is available as something called a budder, a shatter, a wax, a moon rock, a dust, a honey, etc., etc. All available for you to "dab."

What, you don’t know what dabbing is?

Step 5

BE OPEN TO DISCOVERY! LIKE W/R/T SMOKING WEED IN A WAY THAT REMINDS YOU WAY TOO MUCH OF SMOKING CRACK

At the end of Shopper’s week in L.A., Gil, new friend and tour guide, wanted to show Shopper a special place. A vision of the future. Hop in your car, he said, follow me. Gil—you might know him from his Twitter handle, @NugPorn—is one of the principals in a business called WeedMaps, perhaps the greatest single resource for the blazed and would-be blazed anywhere in America it’s legal to buy marijuana. It’s an app. You open it and blinking all around your location are little marijuana leaves, each a dispensary. On your way to a Phish show at Staples? Get blazed in .3 miles! Sometimes it crashes—it’s not Google Maps, it’s WeedMaps. But it is still the most powerful engine driving legal-weed commerce. Not a few dispensaries told Shopper that like 80 percent of their business comes from WeedMaps.

Gil got into his Toyota Tacoma and instantly forgot he’d told Shopper to follow him. Gil forgets things sometimes. That’s okay. Shopper used his GPS and found the Tacoma sitting in front of the ***** dispensary (redacted) on a, yes, nondescript block in Torrance. The buildings were prefab hangars, warehouse-y, like the back end of a large airport that isn’t here. But waiting for him inside one of those buildings was a secret garden of blaze.

Hector, the proprietor of this establishment, is maybe 50, with frizzled hair and lines sunburned around the eyes. A classic Contemporary West face, the face of a man who may or may not be in a motorcycle gang. "Gil, nice to meet you, man!" he said. They exchanged a meaty grip, like: Welcome in from the shitty world, fellow traveler, undo your rucksack and check your blunderbuss, and let’s avail ourselves of a hearty stew and a pint of our finest hash oil!

"This is a hash bar," Gil said. "One of only a few that have started popping up."

The bud room was vast. Three cinder-block walls painted murdered-out matte black and one painted electric green. Half the room was a standard dispensary: edibles, flowers, drinks cooler. A clock set, of course, permanently to four twenty. And the other half was what we were here for. A long brushed-steel bar with thirteen green barstools, rows of small blue blowtorches of the type plumbers use, and a collection of glass "rigs" for smoking concentrate. Or dabbing.

Hector, the owner, used to run an HVAC business. (His name isn’t Hector.) After offering his father the ministrations of blaze when his father was enduring the kind of elongated, painful death that the medical-industrial complex has made possible for all of us, Hector came to the realization that this was his calling. "This is my dream," he said, proudly pointing out where the flat-screens will go, where the video-game consoles will be set up. "This is my vision."

"Shall we do a dab?" Gil said.

A "dab" is how you smoke a concentrate—hash that has been stripped from the plant and transformed via one of a seemingly countless number of chemical processes into something that even a tiny bit of would high you out. We all sat down at the bar. There were three bud tenders. Each looked to be about 23 years old. One of them, a black girl in a purple fur hat with earflaps and a tiny tank top, came over with a torch and a few rigs. Basically how it works is this: There’s a glass apparatus not unlike a bong, with water in the reservoir and a tube that you suck through. There’s another tube for the material on which you’re about to get blazed. At the end of that tube is a titanium piece. The girl in the purple hat took a propane torch and fired up Shopper’s titanium piece—this is called a nail—until it was glowing orange. Then she took an instrument not unlike what your dentist uses to remove plaque and scraped off a dab of concentrate. When she touched the dab to the hot nail, it vaporized, you sucked up the smoke, and poof: blazation.

Everyone had a few helpings; one was more than enough for Shopper, who already felt floaty and detached, struggling to feel he was doing more than watching the world on a strange, foreign TV station.

Meanwhile, next to us, a man in medical scrubs took a seat. It was past five in the afternoon now, and he was on his way home from work. One of the other hash bartenders wandered over. Her hair was blond and she had a tiny frame.

"You want to do a dab?" she asked.

"Oh, _hell _yeah," the patient said.

As she fired up the nail, Hector nodded at her. "You see that girl?" he said. "She has the biggest tolerance of anyone. She pulls bigger rips than my seven-foot security guy."

Watching the blonde woman tending to the nail, scraping up the concentrate, socializing with the customer, what it brought to mind was an opium den. But instead of the drug madam, you have a former HVAC guy. And instead of opium geishas, you have these Southern California wastoid girls, the beautiful bored products of an empty culture in leggings and bras looking like Japanimation cartoons. Shopper doesn’t want to sound all melancholy about it, but taking in the tableau from his green chair, Shopper did, truth be told, feel melancholy. Of course this nation wants to blaze out. There’s so much we want to forget about! There’s so much to disconnect from! And isn’t blazing all about making you appreciate whatever tiny beauty you come across? No matter how ugly the world that beauty is extracted from? Isn’t it often a drug for the dislocated? The (socially, physically, economically) immobile? For those who can’t leave wherever they are, does it not open up even the tiniest (physical or psychic) space and make it feel endlessly explorable?

Gil hollered over to the blonde geisha. He’d brought his own concentrate for everyone to try. Shopper can’t remember now if it was honey or budder or shatter or what. The details flee from him at this point in the story.

"I’d loooove to," she says. "Is it heavy? Will it give me that collapsed-lung feeling?"

Gil says, "I heard you got a set of lungs on you."

"I do."

"Then ain’t no thang. Just a dab."

And so they dab. And was Gil right? He was. They gazed at each other, through instant stonedness.

"I feel the heat!" she said. "Without the weight."

"It’s smooth," Gil said.

"It’s smooth," she agreed.

Step 6

GET READY FOR THE FUTURE—COMING SOON!

One morning, Shopper paid a visit to a man known as Paul Tokin—a microcelebrity in the world of Denver weed. Tokin is known for a video series about the dispensary scene called "Tokin Daily." You can watch him on YouTube give a meandering fifteen-minute monologue while smoking a pre-roll, or reviewing a dispensary in Colorado Springs, or talking to his cat about chicken pot pie. When Shopper arrived at his little bungalow in the Cherry Creek section of the city, he found Paul and his friend Jerrica on two couches, a thin dispersion of smoke hanging between them. Paul is tall and thin but still gnomic, with mineral blue eyes and a long, sparse, wiry goatee that reaches his nipples. He and Jerrica were both in a state of such alpha-wave stillness that they appeared to be experiencing a fundamentally different version of time.

Paul offered to share some medicine.

"This is Blue Dream; enjoy it!" he said, pushing over a bong. The bong looked a little sketch. There was particulate floating in the reservoir. Brown bits, like something coughed up. It’s fine, relax. It’s probably uncool to ask him if he has some alcohol wipes for the mouthpiece or maybe a different rig that’s been through the dishwasher.No, no, be cool, this is a communal thing. And you know what? Once Shopper had taken his medicine, the conversation got easier. The pressure to connect was just reduced. Awkward silences weren’t that awkward anymore. And that helped Shopper and Tokin to, you know, connect.

After discussing the art of marijuana-flower trimming (he does trimming, among other duties, at a Denver dispensary), Paul got to talking about the future. The coming weed world in America. Paul had seen bits and pieces of it already. He was especially excited to tell Shopper about a particular party, the first of its kind. People blazing out together, in broad daylight, without fear of judgment or punitive action. Shopper won’t give the name of the venue, because he doesn’t want to blow up anyone’s spot.

"And there’s this tent set up outside where people can smoke up," he said. There was passion in his voice, and something else.

"But it was so cold?" Jerrica said. "I just want it to get a little warmer. In the spring it’ll be better?"

"Do you know the freedom of that?" Paul said, almost welling up. "To be able to do that? Together? Outside? Like normal people?"

And for that moment, Shopper could feel the immense emotion Paul was trying to communicate. Shopper always imagined it was a coincidence that marriage equality and weed legalization happened kind of at the same time. Just a sudden generational coming of age, a moment when everyone (under 26) looked around and finally said out loud: What the fuck is _wrong _with people? But there’s more to it than random coincidence. It turns out that people who have a serious relationship with their marijuana also often feel like they’ve had to live their lives in the closet. It turns out that these are two slices of demography, gay people and burners, who have felt the pain of having to subvert their true natures every day. Who feel rejected by society. Who’ve been made to feel ashamed of the greatest love in their hearts.

Shopper took in Tokin’s gnomic blue eyes. There was joy and sadness in them. The joy that comes from the first rays breaking through the clouds. The sadness of the emancipated when, finally, upon the occasion of their emancipation, they allow themselves to feel the indignities of slavery. Or in this case: the indignities of people thinking you’re a loser for smoking pot. Shopper is taking the piss here. But also not. Shopper was moved. Shopper met another kid at a so-called marijuana farmers’ market in Seattle. (It’s not a farmers’ market as you would imagine it, unless you are imagining a dozen tiny dispensaries in what looks like an empty big-box store.) He was no more than a kid—giant, sweet, and padded in pudge, with a flat-brimmed baseball hat—sitting in the "medicating room" in back of the market, where one could enjoy one’s purchases. "I am what you call an every-day customer," the kid told Shopper. The kid had been hit by a truck when he was younger. Shattered both his legs. "Where would I be without this? I’d be, like, addicted to methadone or oxy[codone] or whatever." Then he said, "And I like to come here and hang out with like-minded people. No one judges me here. I can medicate, hang out. Then get back on the three buses to get me home. I don’t feel alone here."

So when people ask Shopper: Say, what’s the retail experience out there like in the pot world? Shopper says it’s pretty great if you’re Paul Tokin or the Kid. It’s great for people who are already into the weed lifestyle. It’s great for Deadheads and Star Wars nerds and surfers and hip-hop fanatics. It’s a great shopping experience for people who really do know the difference between the nose and the body high of your Lemon Haze versus your Strawberry Kush. Now, this is a large proportion of people who smoke weed. The medicine itself seems to produce obsessives, or appeal to obsessives—Shopper doesn’t know where the causality lies. But watch someone who smokes a lot of weed roll a joint sometime and ask yourself when the last time was you took that much care or patience with anything. That’s not what people are like when they open a beer, no matter what kind of psychic boner they have for it.

But what the weed-frastructure is not good for yet is the rest of us. The vast commercial sweet spot. The swath of America that Starbucks identified/exploited/invented: people who aren’t already into your product but could be, if the product were sold to them the right way. No one seems dedicated to figuring out how to appeal to those of us who think weed smokers are people who listen to twenty-eight-minute songs by Phish or make videos of their cats eating chicken pot pie or normally watch the same SportsCenter seven times in a day. No one has yet begun to market the product itself, or the _experience _of shopping for it. The way Starbucks marketed coffee as a lifestyle, or Apple branded "devices" as the handbags of a new generation. And judging from the portion of "patients" who only want to go to a dispensary in an office park so no one sees them, that’s still a great deal of America.

Now that market revolution may be around the corner. Or it may not ever totally happen—Shopper has a feeling that America’s new seemingly progressive opinions on weed and prostitution and vice in general can best be described as "toleration" rather than "embrace." It’s like the storied "Don’t ask, don’t tell"policy in the military: Do it, but don’t shove it in our faces, because there’s a lot about this that makes us feel funny. But even moving into the light that little bit is probably going to alter the world that Paul and the Kid live in.

Shopper believes that for now—as it’s been for the past forty years—weed subculture appeals most to people who feel the world has passed them by or have decided to let it, who think all the people plowing through their days in an anxious, striving rush have lost the music of life. Weed itself can be simply about enjoying a pizza, but weed culture is about the communalism one discovers in college, and the weed lifestyle is about never leaving the mind-set you discovered while living in a loft bed at the University of Michigan. It’s about not caring where you shop. It’s a renunciation of the world. But: Here comes the world.

Devin friedman_ is _GQ’s director of editorial projects.

In November, they basically legalized marijuana. Even if you don’t pay attention to ballot initiatives or the like, you probably still possessed a fuzzy picture of where things stood. As of the past election cycle, marijuana is now _totally street legal _in Colorado and Washington. And possibly Oregon? And you’d been hearing for years about all those other places—there was a new state all the time—where you could buy it for medical purposes. Like California and Washington, D.C., and Connecticut and Rhode Island and, like, maybe New Mexico? Meanwhile, even in states where there is not yet a stipulation for those undergoing chemo to be able to blaze out, isn’t it functionally decriminalized? Isn’t it more or less okay to smoke weed right in front of a cop in New York City as long as you’re not killing someone with a tire iron while simultaneously being young and nonwhite? And conventional wisdom, at least from certain purviews, holds that the social taboo surrounding marijuana is now close to zero, whether you’re into older white women in Eileen fisher comfies (see: Steve Martin in It’s Complicated) or rap music (see: rap music).

We’ve supposedly been on the cusp of this new world for a long time. And if we haven’t arrived at it yet, we are now on the cusp of the cusp of the cusp of the future that stoners, libertarians, and other people you’ve gotten stuck talking to in bathroom lines at parties have predicted for decades: a time when marijuana becomes a normal commercial commodity. Grown safely by nice people, tad and regulated. But also packaged and branded! The moment when weed at long last fulfills its vast potential to be one of the great—maybe even the greatest, now that tobacco is passé—American consumer products. Something, like yoga or frozen yogurt, around which distinct lifestyles can be built. Something that, like Rag & Bone blazers and the cheeses of France, can by dint of acquisitional obsession make you forget about everything bad. We may finally be nearing the moment when whether you smoke weed no longer defines you, but maybe _where you shop _for weedwill. The only question is: What kind of shopping bliss awaits us?

It would seem that certain precincts already know the answer to that question. In cities like Los Angeles and Seattle and Denver, where it’s been gray-area legal for years, they’ve already built the foundations of the commercial-weed ecosystem. To know what the future holds, wouldn’t one merely consult an expert in these places?

Step 1

DETERMINE WHAT KIND OF WEED SHOPPER YOU ARE

In the quest to review and systematize the nascent marijuana-shopping experience, the first place _GQ’_s Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, visited was a medical-marijuana dispensary called Denver Relief, which provides relief for people in Denver by way of getting blazed. (_GQ’_s Critical Shopper, Marijuana Division, heard many phrases for being high while reviewing dispensaries—faded, zooted, blasted, smoked yourself cheese-dicked—but objectively the most awesome is blazed, so you should probably get used to reading it.)

Like a lot of dispensaries, Denver Relief is located somewhere most accurately described as nondescript. Critical Shopper literally does not remember where it is, except that you can see a parking lot out the window. The waiting room is the kind of place where it feels like a hot-stone massage might break out at any moment: leather sofas, oriental rugs, piped-in synthesizer music. Shopper flipped through a back issue of National Geographic and The Cannabible while he waited for the receptionist, in a cozy sweater behind a spotless Plexiglas window, to buzz him into the "bud room" when it was his turn.

Would you like to have weed sold to you the way someone might sell you a 2007 Acura with lo miles totally mint? Well, at this little dispensary, located inconspicuously on the fifth floor of a downtown office building, you can! Just listen to Garrett, the salesman, shill the daily special: "Bro, check out my strains of the day, my White Dawg and my Kuchi, $200 an ounce. Smell this; it smells like candy. I’m kicking myself for selling it so cheap, but I have new stuff coming in!"

In the intervening moments of waiting, a chubby shape appeared bushwhacking through the neighborhood outside, all trussed up in technical winter gear and a backpack. Across the four-lane washed in desiccated road salt he hiked, and right up to the front door, where he cupped his hands against the sun’s cold glare and peered into the waiting room, his hood cinched up like a nylon butthole. When his eyes adjusted and he could see Shopper, he grinned. He grinned and he waved: Hello! Shopper waved back.

Once inside and un-buttholed, the bushwhacker began to pose some important questions to the waiting room. "I’d heard this is one of the greatest places in Colorado as far as quality product goes," he said. "Is it true?" His cheeks were flush and his hair matted. He couldn’t stop smiling. He said he’d come in from the other side of the state, and Shopper thought it possible that he’d hiked.

Shopper had on this day brought with him another Critical Marijuana Shopper: the weed reviewer for Westword, the Denver alt-weekly, a man who writes under the name William Breathes. Shopper will not physically describe William Breathes, because his important work is possible only as long as he’s anonymous. Breathes confirmed Bushwhacker’s information. "As far as flower goes?" Breathes said. "The best in Denver are Denver Relief, the Pink House, and the Clinic. The quality is phenomenal."

The bushwhacker got beamier and clapped his hands once as if to say: After all this time and all my travels, I have found the Lost City! He sat back and crossed his arms. He would be satisfied to wait until his turn in the bud room came up, no matter how long it should take.

So that’s the first question you need to ask yourself when you start shopping for weed: How serious am I about marijuana? How erudite do I want to get on it? If this answer is "pretty freaking erudite," you should consider a place like those listed above by Breathes in Denver, or Greenworks or Dockside Co-op in Seattle, or Buds & Roses in Los Angeles. What Shopper calls the Connoisseur Class. Or Straight Nerd Spots. They offer their own brand of experience. To wit:

Once in the bud room, Ean Seeb, one of the proprietors, brought out some of his favorite strains to show Shopper. "This is our LA OG," he said, opening a glass canister filled with sculpted buds, all purplish and gnarled. Ean doesn’t look like the guy who would sell you a dime bag out of the back of a Saturn Vue. He was that day fully _GQ’_ed out in a black cowl-neck sweater. His gray wingtips had neon pink laces. "Give it a smell," he said.

Breathes took the canister and inhaled: "That has a really nice baby powder and kind of...mint! Just a wonderful baby-powder nose on it."

"We say it’s earthy with a hint of dryer sheets," Ean says.

Normally, Shopper would not be allowed in the bud room without a state-issued red card. But Ean made an exception for journalistic purposes. What was it like? A rectangle not bigger than twenty feet across, with faux-exposed-brick walls. Stretching across one side of the room was a long granite countertop with wooden partitions so no one need eyeball your merch. It called to mind the showroom of a rare-coin dealer. Only, behind the counter, lit lovingly, were thirty-two glass jars on shelves. And in each of these jars were dozens and dozens of grotesquely large, obsessively manicured marijuana blossoms. They had names like Bio-Jesus, Gumbo, Tahoe OG, Bio-Diesel, Dopium, Ghost Train Haze, Hashberry, Headband, Q3. All grown by Denver Relief itself, in its enormous grow house. (In Colorado, dispensaries must grow at least 70 percent of their product.) Having come from one of the states where places like this don’t exist, Shopper realized that a pervasive sense of scarcity had always surrounded weed in most parts of society. It’s something people kept in old cigar bos in the backs of underpants drawers, something there was never that much of, and when it ran out, who knew exactly when you could get more? Even without being a particularly avid user, being in one of these rooms for the first time can trigger the same hoarding impulse a Sudanese refugee might feel in a Walmart.

"Oh, wait. Oh, wait," Ean said. "We have some Reserva Privada. That’s what won us first prize for indica in the state of Colorado."

He retrieved a jar. Breathes breathed. "Mmmmm," he said. "Uh-huh, uh-huh. It’s got the sweet earthiness that all the Kushes do. But it’s rubbery. Almost a new-Nike smell. Smell that, [Shopper]."

Shopper, himself, could not smell the new-Nike smell. Shopper could never even tell the difference between the two distinct families of marijuana, sativa and indica, the lemon and lime of the weed world. Every strain Shopper sniffed while critical shopping smelled powerful and more refined than Shopper remembers of even the most high-end product he’s encountered on the black market—as if the component parts of the aroma had been isolated and then remid and amplified. But anytime he said he smelled the tar or the floor-cleaner aroma, he was lying. Because, be aware: If you’re going to spend time in a Connoisseur Class establishment, you’re going to have to say you smell the floor cleaner in the Lemon Haze, or you’re going to bum someone out. The shopping experience at this type of dispensary can be a protracted, and often pleasing, form of blazationforeplay. But it can also mean a decent amount of bullshitting. It was not unusual for Shopper to be offered a dish of coffee beans to cleanse his nose-palate between sniffing strains. Shopper thought it worthwhile to search out places appropriate for those who aren’t as erudite as all that.

Over the course of a month visiting three cities in three states—Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle—Shopper sampled a great deal of the branding and marketing ingenuity of the legal-marijuana industry. Though maybe ingenuity isn’t the right word. It was like witnessing the collective unconscious of the American Stoner—for so long relegated to the margins and the basement rec rooms of this great country—finally unleashed upon the retail spaces of America. And the marketing schemes that have emerged are maybe not the most mainstream. Are you a stoner comic-book nerd? At the APC dispensary in Toluca Lake, California, they attract clientele with a large hand-painted Star Wars mural and strains with names like OG1 Kenobi and Yoda’s Brain. Grateful Dead blazer? You might want to check out Grateful Meds in Nederland, Colorado, and Terrapin Care Station in Boulder. Still other dispensaries evoke surfer weed-dom (like the Lucky LadyZ dispensary on Alki Beach in Seattle) or hip-hop-celebrity weed-dom (like the Perennial Holistic Wellness Center in L.A., which features a giant photograph of Rihanna—coincidentally a GQ cover).

Attention, people who’ve always wanted to hang out in a hash den! This little gem is housed in the basement of a small office building where you’d expect to find an orthodontist. But no retainers here! Instead, gilt stools, velvet upholstery, and low ceilings mark this dispensary. One of the owners explained that, yes, it was meant to evoke "a hash-den vibe." Be sure to pick up a T-shirt or bandanna bearing a Pink House motto: "Down to blaze!"

But what surprised Shopper wasn’t the variety and novelty of the dispensaries. It was how, across three states, they were mostly all the same. All located in places you’d expect to find either a tax preparer or a defunct porn store. Did they have exactly the same names? It sure seemed like it. The Little Green Pharmacy, Green Cure, Mile High Green Cross, the Green Door, Green House. And inside, high-end or low-end, they hewed to the same blueprint. The waiting room. The Plexiglas portal. The portraits of Bob Marley. The giant supercrisp-picture flat-screen TV tuned either to ESPN or to one of the channels that do crime re-creations. The bud room with one case of pipes and bongs, a cooler for drinks, a display of edibles and "concentrates," and, dominating the room, the flower bar, which usually featured canisters of buds arranged in rows from top (highest end) to bottom (best value), with your bud tenders standing nearby, manning the tweezers. Who were usually women and usually attractive. That’s not an accident.

"We prefer female bud tenders," one of the employees at GroundSwell, in Denver, tells Shopper. "Females just sell a lot more weed. Guys like to buy their weed from females. And girls like to buy their weed from females." But really, the shopping is done mostly by men. Shopper went to thirty-odd dispensaries across three cities, and Shopper saw maybe three female patients the whole time.

Still, after a lot of shopping, a nagging question refused to go away: Where was the Barneys of dispensaries? Where was the Fred Segal? Where was the place worthy of a write-up in the most fashionable men’s magazine in the world!? Well, the truth is that there’s no Fred Segal yet. That’s kind of what happens when businesses can’t get loans from banks. (Would you loan millions of dollars to a business that explicitly violated a federal law?) But what is there, then? There are glimmers of luxury-lifestyle hope. There is the Farmacy in Venice Beach, California—maybe the most visionary marijuana retail experience available in America today.

The Farmacy is not tucked into an office park with a view of a parking lot. It’s not located behind a collision-repair shop in the Valley. There is no waiting room. It’s a store. Located on a street. With actual glass windows you can see through both ways. And not just located on the street, but on Abbot Kinney, a stretch of retail nirvana that GQ last year named the coolest shopping street in America. A street where you can buy a $16 vegan young-coconut smoothie, a $140 surf-nostalgia sweatshirt at Aviator Nation, and, yes, a $700 ounce of organically grown Dutch Treat from the Farmacy. On the day Shopper perused, the door was wide open and a breeze was coming in off the Pacific. There was a framed portrait of Bob Marley, but that’s not the ethos. The ethos is: This should feel like a place where you can buy a $95 cotton yoga tank. Wood counters, pretty clientele, young bright-eyed shopkeepers. (They don’t call them "bud tenders" at the Farmacy; that’s too down-market, too stoner-y.) Shopper would like to remind all shoppers, though, that while anyone is welcome to come in and thumb through the library of alternative-medicine books or buy a Farmacy T-shirt, you can’t actually buy weed here unless you happen to be a resident of the state of California and are in possession of a marijuana "recommendation" from your doctor. The Farmacy is strict about its rules. Though not all places in California are.

Step 3

GET YOURSELF A LICENSE TO SHOP*

Not far from the Farmacy is the Venice Beach boardwalk: the sketchiest place in the union to get a "recommendation"—California’s term for a weed prescription. Because California can’t get its regulatory shit together, dispensaries in the state are basically self-regulating, and so is the system for clearing people to be able to buy it medically. And because there are strata of the weed industry that aren’t super -profesh or motivated when it comes to self-regulation, California turns out to be the perfect (read: only) place for people like Shopper to get their weed-buying license.

The first step is picking the disreputable place where you’re going to do it. All along the boardwalk, barkers in bright green doctor’s scrubs are stationed in front of storefronts, yelling, "Get legal today!" They are not doctors! This you will not be confused by, unless you are used to your doctor being a 20-year-old who wears ripped-up Vans and grabs his junk occasionally. Shopper passed by the first storefront that advertised a $50 weed license. Seemed like a rookie move, going to the first place you see. Farther down the boardwalk, though, he saw another barker, a Mr. Luke VIP, who told Shopper he’d get him legal for forty bucks. And so it was that Shopper found himself doing patient intake in a tiny storefront on the boardwalk.

"Yeah, so what’s your address?" the intake professional said, a handsome young surfer type with impressive amounts of strawberry blond hair.

Located at the edge of Seattle’s up-and-coming Arbor Heights neighborhood, this outpost offers a new concept: The entire marijuana-dispensing part of the dispensary is behind a giant Plexiglas wall. Patients enter a stylish but bare room and conduct their business with someone in a weed-filled plastic room. Some say they like it because it seems like an actual pharmacy. For Shopper, it brought to mind one of the ghetto-ass liquor stores he used to frequent as a teenager, what with having to engage the person selling the controlled substance through a Plexiglas drawer. Except, since an ounce of Purple Arrow is $280, this is a ghetto-ass liquor store for yuppies.

Shopper told him. Then Mr. Intake kind of froze. He had sunglasses on, so it was impossible to tell if he’d fallen asleep or what. When he came back to himself, he got this terrified look on his face like: _Who beamed me onto Venice Beach into this human body! I thought I was fornicating with the Duchess of York! _Later, Shopper would hear someone ask Mr. Intake whether that was Hennessy or codeine cough syrup he’d put in his Coke—that kind of explained it.

Intake over, Shopper was told to wait on one of the folding chairs next to a 50-year-old man in a Seminoles hat. Pretty soon, someone would come down and take them over to another place on the boardwalk, where they’d see a doctor. And then to another storefront where they’d get the "recommendation" itself.

Seminoles Hat and Shopper discussed the strangeness of this process. "You ever seen The Wire?" Seminoles Hat asked Shopper. He had. "It’s like when D’Angelo Barksdale is selling you crack—one guy meets you, one guy takes the money, one guy gives you the stuff." Seminoles Hat and Shopper both felt a little scuzzy just then. Maybe it was the boardwalk: Outside, a psychotic in a filthy kilt flew by, his skateboard pulled by a malnourished pit bull. A girl in a hipsta please shirt stopped to watch two tanned homeless teenage drug addicts have a fight.

The second location, where the actual doctor was, turned out to be the $50 place Shopper had passed originally. When Shopper’s name was called, he went into a small room where a medical examination would take place. Though it wasn’t yet 2 p.m., the establishment next door was playing Rick Ross’s "B.M.F." like it was pissed at someone. In this room, barely big enough for his desk, sat a tiny man in a doctor’s coat. Shopper estimates his age at 85. If Shopper were told he was closer to 100 he would be impressed he was so spry, but he wouldn’t be shocked. He wore two sweaters over a yellow T-shirt and a set of hearing aids. To his left was a half-sucked Tootsie Pop on a sticky note. To his right was the peel of a tangerine. Just as the exam started, someone turned up the Rick Ross next door. The doctor’s milky blue eyes lit up: Isn’t this absurd? And it was. Perhaps you’ve seen Being John Malkovich—there was something seventh-and-a-half-floor about this office.

Who knows how he ended up doing this, but this man was an actual medical doctor. Deaf, probably, but a doctor. He took blood pressure and everything. Asked a lot of questions. He seemed especially interested in whether Shopper had any pain in his calves.

"No constriction at all?" he asked after Shopper initially said no.

None.

"What about AIDS. You got any AIDS?"

Not even a little AIDS.

"How do your calves feel—any pain?"

Shopper told the doctor, who was funny for a possible centenarian, that his qualifying condition was sciatica. It was noted on his paperwork.

Here it becomes incumbent upon Shopper to warn all shoppers that it doesn’t cost forty bucks to get legal. It ends up costing at least $110. But like, it’s not legal for people who don’t live in California to get legal, and you know it, so you just deal. By the end, when the lady (Iranian? Uzbek?) who’s yelling at her mom on the phone finally gives you your paperwork, you’re just happy they actually give you something for the money. And seventy minutes after showing up on the boardwalk, Shopper was at a local dispensary that had been recommended by Luke VIP as being "friendly." A huge fellow with neck ink, a sideways baseball hat, and the face of a man who probably used to get punched for a living asked Shopper for his recommendation (here it is!) and his California ID (oh, I just moved here). No worries, the man said. He pointed to some steps: "That way, bro! Take that stairway to heaven!"

Step 4

ENJOY THE MANY WONDROUS THINGS YOU CAN BUY WITH YOUR NEW WEED RECOMMENDATION

Once having ascended that stairway to heaven, Shopper bought a nice light sativa and a homemade medicated Rice Krispies treat. Shoppers, take note: In the new world of marijuana products, you do not have to smoke your medicine. You can eat it in more ways than you thought possible. Once in the rental car, Shopper unwrapped his Rice Krispies treat. This is the future, right? THC presented as an odorless, tasteless chemical that can be slipped into other products. Not so. Open up a THC Rice Krispies treat and it smells like a marijuana swamp burped in your face.

Be careful. "Dosing," as they call it, is totally up to you. Which is weird. It’d be like if you walked into a drugstore and said, "I have strep throat; I need some penicillin." And they just gave you a bottle. "So like how much should I take?" "Whatever, try it out, see what works for you!"

This wasn’t Shopper’s first rodeo. (His first rodeo involved some THC lemonade in Las Vegas and three very nice hours—though it felt like ten minutes/17,000 eternities—lying in the shallows of the wave pool at the Mandalay Bay resort, contemplating the sun’s benevolent radiation and the buoyancy of silicone.) Two small bites seemed safe. But not twenty minutes later, Shopper had pulled onto the shoulder on the 405, thinking: _Why is the GPS lady talking to me in that tone? "_In 500 feet take a right and then another right..."What does that even mean? Wow, traffic is moving so fast. There’s no way to get a car back into that traffic flow. I’ll just wait it out until morning.

So no, it’s not like the old hash brownie that takes two hours to work. But brownie lovers can rest assured that brownies are still on offer. In fact, you can buy your own THC brownie (and blondie) mix so you can blaze out your mind with fresh-from-the-oven baked goods whenever you get the notion. And did you know that they make Ganje Roast Wake-n-Bake Medicated Coffee and Snow Puffs medicated microwave popcorn and Grammy’s chicken dumpling soup and hot-buttered-(medicated)-rum mix? And how yummy do Sweet Grass’s pumpkin pies look at dispensaries all across the great city of Denver? (_So _yummy.) There are snickerdoodles, scratch-baked M&M cookies, THC suckers, baklava, Rainbow Kaos Krunch bars, sodas of all kinds. There’s Canna Bull, for the Red Bull enthusiast who wants to ratchet up the energy of the night while also ratcheting it down. And feel free to enjoy D’z Nutz (dark chocolate that comes in the shape of peanuts). Seattle’s Best Cannabis ice cream brought to mind a more general worry of overmedicating: Don’t edibles introduce a dangerous M. C. Escher staircase/feedback loop of cause and effect, wherein you eat the ice cream or the cookies and then you get high, which makes you eat more cookies/ice cream, which gets you higher, ad infinitum, until you are in your car on the side of the 405 for so long you have to start peeing in water bottles?

But fear not, dieters: Eating medicine doesn’t just have to be incredibly caloric. It can be healthy! At River Rock, in Denver, they’ve been doing these smoothies made with fruit juices, hemp protein, açaí, and the juice from leaves of the Sour Tsunami plant. There is some tasty Ganja Goop—a delicious blend of organic cashews, cacao nibs, and weed-infused tropical oils—for sale throughout Seattle. And if you have food allergies and are weight-conscious and love dietary supplements, why not, as Ean from Denver Relief says, "Check out these gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free organic vegan Zoom Balls with blue-green algae and B vitamins"?

Edibles. That was the trend a few years ago. Now, as you can see, the marketplace has been flooded. But what’s trendy now, Shopper can report, is "concentrates." What used to be called hash but has now been improved upon and is available as something called a budder, a shatter, a wax, a moon rock, a dust, a honey, etc., etc. All available for you to "dab."

What, you don’t know what dabbing is?

Step 5

BE OPEN TO DISCOVERY! LIKE W/R/T SMOKING WEED IN A WAY THAT REMINDS YOU WAY TOO MUCH OF SMOKING CRACK

At the end of Shopper’s week in L.A., Gil, new friend and tour guide, wanted to show Shopper a special place. A vision of the future. Hop in your car, he said, follow me. Gil—you might know him from his Twitter handle, @NugPorn—is one of the principals in a business called WeedMaps, perhaps the greatest single resource for the blazed and would-be blazed anywhere in America it’s legal to buy marijuana. It’s an app. You open it and blinking all around your location are little marijuana leaves, each a dispensary. On your way to a Phish show at Staples? Get blazed in .3 miles! Sometimes it crashes—it’s not Google Maps, it’s WeedMaps. But it is still the most powerful engine driving legal-weed commerce. Not a few dispensaries told Shopper that like 80 percent of their business comes from WeedMaps.

Gil got into his Toyota Tacoma and instantly forgot he’d told Shopper to follow him. Gil forgets things sometimes. That’s okay. Shopper used his GPS and found the Tacoma sitting in front of the ***** dispensary (redacted) on a, yes, nondescript block in Torrance. The buildings were prefab hangars, warehouse-y, like the back end of a large airport that isn’t here. But waiting for him inside one of those buildings was a secret garden of blaze.

Hector, the proprietor of this establishment, is maybe 50, with frizzled hair and lines sunburned around the eyes. A classic Contemporary West face, the face of a man who may or may not be in a motorcycle gang. "Gil, nice to meet you, man!" he said. They exchanged a meaty grip, like: Welcome in from the shitty world, fellow traveler, undo your rucksack and check your blunderbuss, and let’s avail ourselves of a hearty stew and a pint of our finest hash oil!

"This is a hash bar," Gil said. "One of only a few that have started popping up."

The bud room was vast. Three cinder-block walls painted murdered-out matte black and one painted electric green. Half the room was a standard dispensary: edibles, flowers, drinks cooler. A clock set, of course, permanently to four twenty. And the other half was what we were here for. A long brushed-steel bar with thirteen green barstools, rows of small blue blowtorches of the type plumbers use, and a collection of glass "rigs" for smoking concentrate. Or dabbing.

Hector, the owner, used to run an HVAC business. (His name isn’t Hector.) After offering his father the ministrations of blaze when his father was enduring the kind of elongated, painful death that the medical-industrial complex has made possible for all of us, Hector came to the realization that this was his calling. "This is my dream," he said, proudly pointing out where the flat-screens will go, where the video-game consoles will be set up. "This is my vision."

"Shall we do a dab?" Gil said.

A "dab" is how you smoke a concentrate—hash that has been stripped from the plant and transformed via one of a seemingly countless number of chemical processes into something that even a tiny bit of would high you out. We all sat down at the bar. There were three bud tenders. Each looked to be about 23 years old. One of them, a black girl in a purple fur hat with earflaps and a tiny tank top, came over with a torch and a few rigs. Basically how it works is this: There’s a glass apparatus not unlike a bong, with water in the reservoir and a tube that you suck through. There’s another tube for the material on which you’re about to get blazed. At the end of that tube is a titanium piece. The girl in the purple hat took a propane torch and fired up Shopper’s titanium piece—this is called a nail—until it was glowing orange. Then she took an instrument not unlike what your dentist uses to remove plaque and scraped off a dab of concentrate. When she touched the dab to the hot nail, it vaporized, you sucked up the smoke, and poof: blazation.

Everyone had a few helpings; one was more than enough for Shopper, who already felt floaty and detached, struggling to feel he was doing more than watching the world on a strange, foreign TV station.

Meanwhile, next to us, a man in medical scrubs took a seat. It was past five in the afternoon now, and he was on his way home from work. One of the other hash bartenders wandered over. Her hair was blond and she had a tiny frame.

"You want to do a dab?" she asked.

"Oh, _hell _yeah," the patient said.

As she fired up the nail, Hector nodded at her. "You see that girl?" he said. "She has the biggest tolerance of anyone. She pulls bigger rips than my seven-foot security guy."

Watching the blonde woman tending to the nail, scraping up the concentrate, socializing with the customer, what it brought to mind was an opium den. But instead of the drug madam, you have a former HVAC guy. And instead of opium geishas, you have these Southern California wastoid girls, the beautiful bored products of an empty culture in leggings and bras looking like Japanimation cartoons. Shopper doesn’t want to sound all melancholy about it, but taking in the tableau from his green chair, Shopper did, truth be told, feel melancholy. Of course this nation wants to blaze out. There’s so much we want to forget about! There’s so much to disconnect from! And isn’t blazing all about making you appreciate whatever tiny beauty you come across? No matter how ugly the world that beauty is extracted from? Isn’t it often a drug for the dislocated? The (socially, physically, economically) immobile? For those who can’t leave wherever they are, does it not open up even the tiniest (physical or psychic) space and make it feel endlessly explorable?

Gil hollered over to the blonde geisha. He’d brought his own concentrate for everyone to try. Shopper can’t remember now if it was honey or budder or shatter or what. The details flee from him at this point in the story.

"I’d loooove to," she says. "Is it heavy? Will it give me that collapsed-lung feeling?"

Gil says, "I heard you got a set of lungs on you."

"I do."

"Then ain’t no thang. Just a dab."

And so they dab. And was Gil right? He was. They gazed at each other, through instant stonedness.

"I feel the heat!" she said. "Without the weight."

"It’s smooth," Gil said.

"It’s smooth," she agreed.

Step 6

GET READY FOR THE FUTURE—COMING SOON!

One morning, Shopper paid a visit to a man known as Paul Tokin—a microcelebrity in the world of Denver weed. Tokin is known for a video series about the dispensary scene called "Tokin Daily." You can watch him on YouTube give a meandering fifteen-minute monologue while smoking a pre-roll, or reviewing a dispensary in Colorado Springs, or talking to his cat about chicken pot pie. When Shopper arrived at his little bungalow in the Cherry Creek section of the city, he found Paul and his friend Jerrica on two couches, a thin dispersion of smoke hanging between them. Paul is tall and thin but still gnomic, with mineral blue eyes and a long, sparse, wiry goatee that reaches his nipples. He and Jerrica were both in a state of such alpha-wave stillness that they appeared to be experiencing a fundamentally different version of time.

Paul offered to share some medicine.

"This is Blue Dream; enjoy it!" he said, pushing over a bong. The bong looked a little sketch. There was particulate floating in the reservoir. Brown bits, like something coughed up. It’s fine, relax. It’s probably uncool to ask him if he has some alcohol wipes for the mouthpiece or maybe a different rig that’s been through the dishwasher.No, no, be cool, this is a communal thing. And you know what? Once Shopper had taken his medicine, the conversation got easier. The pressure to connect was just reduced. Awkward silences weren’t that awkward anymore. And that helped Shopper and Tokin to, you know, connect.

After discussing the art of marijuana-flower trimming (he does trimming, among other duties, at a Denver dispensary), Paul got to talking about the future. The coming weed world in America. Paul had seen bits and pieces of it already. He was especially excited to tell Shopper about a particular party, the first of its kind. People blazing out together, in broad daylight, without fear of judgment or punitive action. Shopper won’t give the name of the venue, because he doesn’t want to blow up anyone’s spot.

"And there’s this tent set up outside where people can smoke up," he said. There was passion in his voice, and something else.

"But it was so cold?" Jerrica said. "I just want it to get a little warmer. In the spring it’ll be better?"

"Do you know the freedom of that?" Paul said, almost welling up. "To be able to do that? Together? Outside? Like normal people?"

And for that moment, Shopper could feel the immense emotion Paul was trying to communicate. Shopper always imagined it was a coincidence that marriage equality and weed legalization happened kind of at the same time. Just a sudden generational coming of age, a moment when everyone (under 26) looked around and finally said out loud: What the fuck is _wrong _with people? But there’s more to it than random coincidence. It turns out that people who have a serious relationship with their marijuana also often feel like they’ve had to live their lives in the closet. It turns out that these are two slices of demography, gay people and burners, who have felt the pain of having to subvert their true natures every day. Who feel rejected by society. Who’ve been made to feel ashamed of the greatest love in their hearts.

Shopper took in Tokin’s gnomic blue eyes. There was joy and sadness in them. The joy that comes from the first rays breaking through the clouds. The sadness of the emancipated when, finally, upon the occasion of their emancipation, they allow themselves to feel the indignities of slavery. Or in this case: the indignities of people thinking you’re a loser for smoking pot. Shopper is taking the piss here. But also not. Shopper was moved. Shopper met another kid at a so-called marijuana farmers’ market in Seattle. (It’s not a farmers’ market as you would imagine it, unless you are imagining a dozen tiny dispensaries in what looks like an empty big-box store.) He was no more than a kid—giant, sweet, and padded in pudge, with a flat-brimmed baseball hat—sitting in the "medicating room" in back of the market, where one could enjoy one’s purchases. "I am what you call an every-day customer," the kid told Shopper. The kid had been hit by a truck when he was younger. Shattered both his legs. "Where would I be without this? I’d be, like, addicted to methadone or oxy[codone] or whatever." Then he said, "And I like to come here and hang out with like-minded people. No one judges me here. I can medicate, hang out. Then get back on the three buses to get me home. I don’t feel alone here."

So when people ask Shopper: Say, what’s the retail experience out there like in the pot world? Shopper says it’s pretty great if you’re Paul Tokin or the Kid. It’s great for people who are already into the weed lifestyle. It’s great for Deadheads and Star Wars nerds and surfers and hip-hop fanatics. It’s a great shopping experience for people who really do know the difference between the nose and the body high of your Lemon Haze versus your Strawberry Kush. Now, this is a large proportion of people who smoke weed. The medicine itself seems to produce obsessives, or appeal to obsessives—Shopper doesn’t know where the causality lies. But watch someone who smokes a lot of weed roll a joint sometime and ask yourself when the last time was you took that much care or patience with anything. That’s not what people are like when they open a beer, no matter what kind of psychic boner they have for it.

But what the weed-frastructure is not good for yet is the rest of us. The vast commercial sweet spot. The swath of America that Starbucks identified/exploited/invented: people who aren’t already into your product but could be, if the product were sold to them the right way. No one seems dedicated to figuring out how to appeal to those of us who think weed smokers are people who listen to twenty-eight-minute songs by Phish or make videos of their cats eating chicken pot pie or normally watch the same SportsCenter seven times in a day. No one has yet begun to market the product itself, or the _experience _of shopping for it. The way Starbucks marketed coffee as a lifestyle, or Apple branded "devices" as the handbags of a new generation. And judging from the portion of "patients" who only want to go to a dispensary in an office park so no one sees them, that’s still a great deal of America.

Now that market revolution may be around the corner. Or it may not ever totally happen—Shopper has a feeling that America’s new seemingly progressive opinions on weed and prostitution and vice in general can best be described as "toleration" rather than "embrace." It’s like the storied "Don’t ask, don’t tell"policy in the military: Do it, but don’t shove it in our faces, because there’s a lot about this that makes us feel funny. But even moving into the light that little bit is probably going to alter the world that Paul and the Kid live in.

Shopper believes that for now—as it’s been for the past forty years—weed subculture appeals most to people who feel the world has passed them by or have decided to let it, who think all the people plowing through their days in an anxious, striving rush have lost the music of life. Weed itself can be simply about enjoying a pizza, but weed culture is about the communalism one discovers in college, and the weed lifestyle is about never leaving the mind-set you discovered while living in a loft bed at the University of Michigan. It’s about not caring where you shop. It’s a renunciation of the world. But: Here comes the world.

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